"Yeah. You get that. Requests for signing statements is probably the biggest part of the story. Well, I don’t think it has actually in my case. I don’t go to places where I’m invited (just) because I’ve got a Nobel. (laugh) I don’t want to decorate anybody. So I try to keep on working. On the whole, I think it can happen, (but) I think it hasn’t happened in my case. I think I’ve, I’ve kept pretty much…. And the things that I have gotten as a result of it, on the whole, have been things I liked to go to, and I simply turned down things that I’m not interested in. So I don’t think it’s been a strongly negative matter at all."

"I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it. One reason was that I feared that such a prize, as I believe is true of the activities of some of the great scientific foundations, would tend to accentuate the swings of scientific fashion. This apprehension the selection committee has brilliantly refuted by awarding the prize to one whose views are as unfashionable as mine are. I do not yet feel equally reassured concerning my second cause of apprehension. It is that the Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess. This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally. There is no reason why a man who has made a distinctive contribution to economic science should be omnicompetent on all problems of society - as the press tends to treat him till in the end he may himself be persuaded to believe."

"My response was the common one. At 5:30 in the morning the phone rang. My wife (was) in bed next to me and said, which child has had an accident? I listened and a Swedish accented voice said how does it feel to win the Nobel Prize? I wasn’t sure that it wasn’t a hoax, but I said to my wife, it’s okay, no child is involved. Then the announcement came that I had been named. It seemed genuine and not a hoax, and I was surprised. I think one of my reactions was, and my second daughter criticized me later when I told her about it, I said well it’s nice to have a lot of hard work rewarded. She said that was a very stuck up answer (laugh)."

"Things are stuck now."

"The West has unfortunately already started to go along this path. I know, to many it may sound ridiculous to suggest that the West has turned to socialism, but it's only ridiculous if you only limit yourself to the traditional economic definition of socialism, which says that it's an economic system where the state owns the means of production. This definition in my view, should be updated in the light of current circumstances. Today, states don't need to directly control the means of production to control every aspect of the lives of individuals. With tools such as printing money, debt, subsidies, controlling the interest rate, price controls, and regulations to correct so-called market failures, they can control the lives and fates of millions of individuals. This is how we come to the point where, by using different names or guises, a good deal of the generally accepted ideologies in most Western countries are collectivist variants, whether they proclaim to be openly communist, fascist, socialist, social democrats, national socialists, Christian democrats, neo-Keynesians, progressives, populists, nationalists or globalists. Ultimately, there are no major differences. They all say that the state should steer all aspects of the lives of individuals. They all defend a model contrary to the one that led humanity to the most spectacular progress in its history."

"I think the basic issue there is the question of whether there are any dead weight losses or market filures of a macroeconomic nature in a market economy. Neo-Keynesians think there are and that the government can do something about them. They think that demand management policy can assist the economy to stay close to its equilibrium track."

"I was never under any illusion about the theoretical possibility that the Phillips curve is vertical. In fact, I could cite passages that precede Friedman and Phelps, which say that it could well be. But all the empirical findings before 1966 suggested that the feedback term from price inflation to wages was considerably less than one so I accepted a nonvertical Phillips curve. I was probably overoptimistic about the degree to which you could expand employment in the '60s. In fact, I have acknowledged that in print. We at the council had stated 4 percent as what would now be called the natural rate of unemployment, I suppose, with a nonaccelerating rate of inflation. We did get the 4 percent before the Vietnam War, and we didn't have any accelerating rate of inflation. Maybe that was because we had an incomes policy. It was a rather weak one; it was sometimes called "open-mouth" policy. It was an informal guide-post policy, but in retrospect it looks like it made more difference than people credited it for. At any rate, the acceleration of inflations came when Johnson disobeyed his economic advisers. We went down to 3 percent unemployment which was probably well below the natural rate. So, I could admit to having been too optimistic."

"Ragnar Frisch / Jan Tinbergen (1969)"

"The essential problem of the West today is not just that we need to come to grips with those who, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the overwhelming empirical evidence, continue to advocate for impoverishing socialism. But there's also our own leaders, thinkers and academics who are relying on a misguided theoretical framework to undermine the fundamentals of the system that has given us the greatest expansion of wealth and prosperity in our history. The theoretical framework to which I refer is that of Neoclassical economic theory, which designs a set of instruments that, unwillingly or without meaning to, end up serving intervention by the state, socialism and social degradation."

"The problem with Neoclassicals is that the model they fell in love with does not map reality, so they put down their mistakes to supposed market failures rather than reviewing the premises of the model. Under the pretext of a supposed market failure, regulations are introduced. These regulations create distortions in the price system, prevent economic calculus, and therefore also prevent saving, investment and growth. This problem lies mainly in the fact that not even supposed libertarian economists understand what the market is because if they did understand, it would quickly be seen that it's impossible for there to be market failures. The market is not a mere graph describing a curve of supply and demand. The market is a mechanism for social cooperation, where you voluntarily exchange ownership rights. Therefore based on this definition, talking about a market failure is an oxymoron. There are no market failures. If transactions are voluntary, the only context in which there can be market failure is if there is coercion and the only one that is able to coerce generally is the state, which holds a monopoly on violence. Consequently, if someone considers that there is a market failure, I would suggest that they check to see if there is state intervention involved. And if they find that that's not the case, I would suggest that they check again, because obviously there's a mistake. Market failures do not exist."

"That was building up during the '50s, in the so-called neoclassical synthesis, better called the neoclassical-neo-Keynesian synthesis, I think. The main thing was that classical economics didn't explain the Great Depesssion and didn't give you any hope of solving it. Keynesian economics did."

"The Neoclassical Synthesis was taken as an article of faith. Fundamental questions about the failures of the market system, such as the causes of periodic depressions and the unemployment that accompanied them, were avoided."

"Paul Samuelson (1970)"

"There are many anticipators of marginal analysis. Three major names were Augustin Cournot (1801-1877), J. H. von Thünen (1783-1850), and H. H. Gossen (1810-1858). Cournot's originality and ingenuity can hardly be exaggerated. 200 small pages, he described and defined the downward-sloping , completely analyzed the maximization of profit under conditions of monopoly, advanced an ingenious explanation of pricing, proved that equilibrium price occurred when equaled , and exactly defined the market from which we call perfect competition and he called "unlimited competition." And the book went unread."

"There's a lot of misplaced criticism of equilibrium models. For explaining 1950-, 1960-, 1970-type business cycles, they're a lot more robust than some people give them credit for. The failure of wages and prices to adjust is no problem because there's a lot of reasons, many of them coming from contract theory and models of enduring relationships, that would lead one not to expect the current real wage/price to adjust to clear the current labor market. [...] What we mean by equilibrium is essentially two things. First, we set out to explain data on prices and quantities as resulting from the interaction of individual decisions; that's the key thing together with the notion that markets clear in some sense. That doesn't mean everybody has a job every period. The notion of clearing may be much more complicated and may involve lotteries. There are various responses why workers are unemployed. [...] Another thing is that these environments are sufficiently complicated so that it's not automatic that equilibria are optimal."

"Today orthodox economics accepts Keynes's critique of the self-regulating market mainly by acknowledging that the market economy may deviate from its normal equilibrium in the short run, and so display Keynesian characteristics, while in the long run, normal, full-employment equilibrium will be restored as the prices eventually adjust to equilibrium levels. This orthodox rendition of Keynes seems to accept his insights, while neatly preserving the basic elements of supply-and-demand theory. A centerpiece of this revisionism was the work of J.S. Hicks, familiar to students of macro-economics as the "IS-LM" model. Hicks's gloss on Keynes, first published in 1937, holds that the market economy fails to attain full employment mainly because money wages are "sticky." That is, they fail to adjust immediately to real changes in economic conditions. Since labor costs are a principal ingredient of product costs, sticky money wages keep up prices too, and so ensure a high demand for money for transactions purposes, in turn keeping interest rates high. If only money wages would fall, the demand for money would fall too, interest rates would come down, and the decline in interest rates would stimulate an increase in investment, raising output and moving the economy toward full employment."

"The sum and substance of the "Keynesian Revolution" was the thesis that there can be an unemployment equilibrium on the free market. As we have seen, the only sense in which this is true was known years before Keynes: that widespread union maintenance of excessively high wage rates will cause unemployment."

"During the early 1930s, there was a great deal of interest, in the United States and Great Britain, in Mises's theory of the trade cycle, an interest unfortunately nipped in the bud by the excitement surrounding the "Keynesian Revolution.""

"Keynes was scarcely a "revolutionary" in any real sense. He possessed the tactical wit to dress up ancient statist and inflationist fallacies with modern, pseudoscientific jargon, making them appear to be the latest findings of economic science. Keynes was thereby able to ride the tidal wave of statism and socialism, of managed and planning economies. Keynes eliminated economic theory's ancient role as spoilsport for inflationist and statist schemes, leading a new generation of economists on to academic power and to political pelf and privilege."

"If liberalism's core doctrine is that, given institutional adherence to the rights of life, liberty, and property, civil society can be counted on by and large to run itself, and if the showcase example in liberalism's brief is the undirected market economy's capacity to function satisfactorily, then the "Keynesian Revolution" signaled the abandonment of liberalism."

"The great economists were harbingers of new ideas. The economic policies they recommended were at variance with the policies practiced by contemporary governments and political parties. As a rule many years, even decades, passed before public opinion accepted the new ideas as propagated by the economists, and before the required corresponding changes in policies were effected.It was different with the "new economics" of Lord Keynes. The policies he advocated were precisely those which almost all governments, including the British, had already adopted many years before his "General Theory" was published. Keynes was not an innovator and champion of new methods of managing economic affairs. His contribution consisted rather in providing an apparent justification for the policies which were popular with those in power in spite of the fact that all economists viewed them as disastrous. His achievement was a rationalization of the policies already practiced. He was not a "revolutionary," as some of his adepts called him. The "Keynesian revolution" took place long before Keynes approved of it and fabricated a pseudo-scientific justification for it. What he really did was to write an apology for the prevailing policies of governments.This explains the quick success of his book. It was greeted enthusiastically by the governments and the ruling political parties. Especially enraptured were a new type of intellectuals, the "government economists." They had had a bad conscience. They were aware of the fact that they were carrying out policies which all economists condemned as contrary to purpose and disastrous. Now they felt relieved. The "new economics" reestablished their moral equilibrium. Today they are no longer ashamed of being the handymen of bad policies. They glorify themselves. They are the prophets of the new creed."

"I think that Keynes was certainly a good example of a new paradigm. His work is possibly the best example of a case for which I think Kuhn's theory fits as well as it can in the domain of the social sciences. In a fairly short period of time, Keynes gave a new way of looking at the economy, a way which was widely accepted, at least by the younger generation."

"Work by economists reexamining the so-called Keynes-versus-the-classics debate has led to another debate, one that might be termed the Keynes-and-the-Keynesians debate. Economists refer to both Keynes's General Theory and the ensuing debates as the Keynesian Revolution. The word revolution implies a radical break with previous tradition. Early work on this revolution dealt with what Keynes was really saying and with how much and where it differed in general terms from what his predecessors had said. Interest then shifted to what Keynes's predecessors really said: was there truly a "classical economics" or was this simply a straw man to make Keynes's writings look significant."

"The Keynesian revolution, led by Alvin Hansen, Seymour Harris, Abba P. Lerner, and Paul Samuelson, among others, excited the minds of a new generation of economists for several reasons. First, Keynes's middle-of-the-road policies were viewed, not as a threat to free-market capitalism, but as its savior. According to Marxism, which was growing in influence in the 1930s, capitalism was inherently unstable and would be characterized by periodic crises and depressions. Keynes's allegation that government could expand or contract aggregate demand as conditions required seemed to eliminate the apparent cycle in capitalism without eliminating capitalism itself. A laissez-faire policy of economic freedom could be preserved on a microeconomic level. Thus, Keynes changed the dismal science to the optimists' club: man could be the master of his economic destiny."

"Though with its reliance on apparently measurable magnitudes it appears at first more scientific than the older microtheory, it seems to me that it has achieved this pseudo-exactness at the price of disregarding the relationships which really govern the economic system. Even though the schemata of micro-economics do not claim to achieve those quantitative predictions at which the ambitions of macro-economics aim, I believe by learning to content ourselves with the more modest aims of the former, we shall gain more insight into at least the principle on which the complex order of economic life operates, than by the artificial simplification necessary for macro-theory which tends to conceal nearly all that really matters. I venture to predict that once this problem of method is settled, the 'Keynesian Revolution' will appear as an episode during which erroneous conceptions of the appropriate scientific method led to the temporary obliteration of many important insights which we had already achieved and which we shall then have painfully to regain."

"John Maynard Keynes, late economic adviser to the British Government, is the new prophet of inflationism. The "Keynesian Revolution" consisted in the fact that he openly espoused the doctrines of Silvio Gesel. As the foremost of the British Gesellians, Lord Keynes adopted also the peculiar messianic jargon of inflationist literature and introduced it into official documents. Credit expansion, says the Paper of the British Experts of April 8, 1943, performs the "miracle . . . of turning a stone into bread." The author of this document was, of course, Keynes. Great Britain has indeed traveled a long way to this statement from Hume's and Mill's views on miracles."

"I do not consider the term "Keynesian revolution" appropriate. [...] It seemed to be a more political event than a scientific event. The Depression discredited the whole profession, people were alarmed about it. The General Theory is a political response to the Depression and to the discrediting of conventional economics that resulted from it.But I should acknowledge that Keynes left an opening for younger econometricians and mathematical economists to take over and to write down models. When their senior colleagues criticized their models, they could say, "Well, these are Keynesian models." And since the older people still hadn't caught up with Keynes, that shut them up. So people like Klein and Tinbergen took over because they had the exciting new methods."

"In this extended survey, we have witnessed a kaleidoscopic variety of opinions and reactions to the Keynesian revolution. Unfortunately, no immediate consensus among free-market advocates arose in response to the challenge of a new and dangerous macroeconomics that grew out of the Great Depression. Some dismissed Keynes prematurely; others considered Keynes a major threat; still others treated his theory as a second-best solution to the vagaries of laissez-faire capitalism. Many were mesmerized by Keynes's new bag of techniques, which they could not always claim fully to understand. Because no united front developed to counter the Keynesian revolution, the most industrialized nations of the world languished under the spell of its magic."

"Simon Kuznets (1971)"

"Finn E. Kydland / Edward C. Prescott (2004)"

"Until recently, economists have not been particularly carried away with concern over environmental problems caused by industrial development. Just as in the other sciences, the few economists ...who have always sounded the alarm ...are somewhat out of the mainstream. These humanist concerns seem to have gone out of style after the age of classical economics. Even the conventional analytical models of contemporary economics seem to prefer to exclude these concepts by ignoring them entirely or by shunting them off into their own branch, called "economic externalities." These externalities include any “given” or windfall factor, such as the availability of transportation, technological know-how, a labor force, or resources, factors that are not themselves directly involved in the economic analysis of markets and businesses. For example, the regularly bright and sunny weather of Hollywood was considered an external economy of the movie industry there. The movie moguls, no matter how tyrannical, could neither turn on nor turn off the sun. But as the surrounding community grew and the smog thickened, the weather became an external economy. In very recent years concern over these economic externalities has grown. The environmentalists are beginning to be included in the mainstream. The literature is growing, and professional meetings include sessions on environmental economics. Attempts are even being made to extend the theoretical framework to include the changes in the environment caused by economic activity. [...] The Materials Flow of the Economy... sees the human race living on a 'space ship earth' in which all the inputs and outputs, all the original resources and all the final wastes, must be accounted for. Furthermore, when the materials are returned in the form of smoke, sewage, garbage, junk, heat, noise, and a wide variety of noxious gases, the world becomes a very changed place — and the change is seldom for the better. Implicit in this materials flow concept of the economy is that the less production that is needed to maintain an adequate level of affluence, the better. An efficient economy is one that gets big results with little effort. More industries, more mines, more businesses, more employment, and more consumer goods do not always mean more well-being... because all these also mean more destruction of our natural resources and despoilation of our surroundings."

"Alongside their work on pure economic theory, the classical political economists engaged in a parallel project: to promote the forcible reconstruction of society into a purely market-oriented system. ... Most people in Britain did not enthusiastically engage in wage labor—at least so long as they had an alternative. To make sure that people accepted wage labor, the classical political economists actively advocated measures to deprive people of their traditional means of support. ... Perhaps because so much of what the classical economists wrote about traditional systems of agricultural production was divorced from the seemingly more timeless remarks about pure theory, later readers have passed over such portions of their works in haste. ... I argue that these interventionist recommendations were a significant element in the overall thrust of their works. Specifically, classical political economy advocated restricting the viability of traditional occupations in the countryside to coerce people to work for wages."

"The classical economists were brilliant and creative minds who, if reborn among us today, would soon forge to the peak of our profession. But they lived in early times and had no access to the scientific knowledge and know-how that has accumulated over the centuries. Therefore, a modern graduate student is expected to improvise a more accurate account of the incidence of export subsidies than any classical writer ever managed to fabricate. In order to adjudicate the merits of the Ricardo and Smith litigants, I ought first to sketch a tolerably accurate, modern account of the incidence process."

"In general the claim can be supported that a view of classical political economy as committed to extreme laissez-faire or unmitigated economic individualism misrepresents or at the very least analytically overgeneralizes their circumscribed theoretical and practical aims. In general then, with regard to both political and economic liberty, the classical political economists might be seen to be united in their efforts to theorize and systematize the productive and allocating functions of the mechanism of the market as the most efficient means to engender the growth of wealth. At the same time, classicals such as Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and Mill recognized that the market, of necessity, operated in a larger context of restriction – not only legal, but equally as important, within political, religious, moral, and conventional restrictions – which could not be readily or in some cases even desirably overcome."

"There were many ways in which the Keynesian revolution could have developed. It could have extended to core theory and connected to Robertson's and Hayek's work, but it did not, in large part because of the interest of the Keynesian revolutionaries in policy. Complex core theory has little to say about policy; surface theory has much to say. Thus much of the early work in Keynesian economics involved the development of policy-related surface theory. A key place for this development was the Harvard seminar centered around Alvin Hansen, who had come from the University of Minnesota as the first Littauer Professor and who became the one tenured Harvard faculty member accepting Keynesian ideas. With Hansen the young Keynesians had a powerful faculty ally who, like them, was primarily interested in policy, not complex theory. Thus, like a river, the Keynesian revolution followed the path of least resistance, and it was this area of theoretical policy that constituted that path."

"As was the case with the Keynesian theoretical revolution, the Keynesian policy revolution in the United States did not need to be tied to The General Theory. It could have occurred without The General Theory, and much of it ― specifically the emphasis given to monetary and fiscal policy ― was as much a C.E.D. revolution as it was a Keyneisan revolution. Our interviews support this view, and it explains an interesting event recounted in a story about a seminar at which Keynes repudiated what was then thought to be Keynesian economics. This Keynesian policy revolution could be garnered from the Treatise as easily as from The General Theory, and indeed was. Ironically, this policy revolution, while in many ways the least revolutionary aspect of the Keynesian revolution, was the most contentious at the time. People care about policy in ways they do not care about theories or textbooks. That it took place in the 1930s made this policy revolution all the more contentious."

"The Keynesian Revolution is one of the most remarkable episodes in the entire history of economic thought; certainly never before and perhaps never since has the economics profession been won over so rapidly and so massively to a new economic theory."